Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that today Bryan Appleyard published his long-awaited interview with Art De Vany in The Sunday Times Magazine.

For new subscribers to this blog, Professor De Vany is a long-term advocate of a lifestyle that mimics that of our paleolithic ancestors, at least in terms of diet and exercise. The Knackered Hack has been echoing this approach, with increasing strictness, for well over a year now. Appleyard, who has himself adopted the diet and shed about a stone, noted how vigorous the professor was for a 71-year-old in various domains, about one of which I am myself still gathering data . If the professor’s nocturnal experience can be replicated, then this will probably be the clincher for a lot of people as they realise the value of the paleo diet in helping them with more than just weight-loss.

More seriously, you can’t help but feel pleased that De Vany’s devotion to the study, practice and dissemination of a more natural way of health is getting the recognition that it surely deserves. This is perhaps an important landmark when you consider that it was Nassim Taleb who told me in the same context that press coverage overstates the risk to society of terrorism and understates the risk of insulin insensitivity, so that we wander around with the wrong probabilistic map. Gary Taubes‘ The Diet Delusion gets a mention in the piece too.

One objection that could be raised is that economic pressures might now be pushing people towards a more refined-carb diet because it might appear cheaper. But in my own experience of stress — and there has been no shortage this year with a double bereavement and other tricky family matters to attend to — the cognitive benefits of the paleo lifestyle can also provide a necessary fresh energy and focus to tackle these new challenges. My basic advice would be to avoid “comfort” food at all costs.

I’m reading James Le Fanu‘s book on The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine at the moment (a tip also from Art’s early blogposts which I’m also in the process of re-reading). Like Taubes, Le Fanu debunks various post-war social and dietary theories of health, particularly with regard to cancer and heart disease. Cancer, Le Fanu says, is best understood as a disease of ageing rather than lifestyle. And yet, in contrast, it’s evident that De Vany (as Appleyard makes clear) is no quack, but someone who has applied the sciences of complexity to a rigorous examination of what we “modern lab-rats” really should be doing to forestall that process of terminal illness. Weight-loss is clearly such a central issue that a diet capable of returning you to your weight when you were 21 must be taken very seriously indeed.

Well, on my desk for a number of weeks (apart from many august tomes that I should have been reading and absorbing) one has stood out. It’s a 1936 children’s book, entitled Uncle Ray’s Story of the Stone-Age People. It looks like it came out just before De Vany was born. It belonged to my father-in-law: himself a sometime professor of mathematics, WHO health statistician, and poet. Alas, it certainly did not encourage him to follow anything like a paleo lifestyle. The one seemingly useful piece of science that the book contains is the suggestion that our ancestors broke the bones of their prey in order to consume the marrow.

Of course, while our diet may have changed a lot in the past 100,000 years (and arguably for the worse), this humble volume would indicate that casual male efforts to combine DIY and childcare have been alarming womankind for millennia with remarkable consistency. A more up-to-date orange-coloured book of Stone Age advice will soon be available here.

I thought I should point you in the direction of a new anthology of blog posts, written by some of the leading online proponents of ancestral fitness. It’ll soon be available at www.ancestralfitness.com and will make the ideal gift for the Neanderthal in your life in need of a little self-improvement.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of ancestral fitness, it describes a lifestyle philosophy which attempts to incorporate diet and exercise regimes consistent with our evolutionary biology. That translates as a diet avoiding “easy” carbs, and exercise revolving around high-intensity workouts. There’s more to it than that, naturally.

Of course, top of the list of contributors is Professor Art De Vany. But why they roped in the last guy is anybody’s guess. I bet he’s pleased to be in such illustrious company.

I was feeling guilty about my carbon footprint as I drove four teenagers to the airport on the other side of London last night, so I decided to swing back via the Royal Albert Hall. Although five minutes late for the start of the late night BBC Prom concert, I was nevertheless admitted halfway through at 10:40pm on a £5 standing-room ticket.

It was a serendipitous opportunity for me to hear the world-renowned Tallis Scholars sing some Renaissance Franco/Flemish choral music by Obrecht, Ockeghem and Josquin Des Prez that was completely unfamiliar to me. You can listen too by going here for the next few days on BBC iPlayer.

Well what has this got to do with broken things, the putative subject of this blog? The answer is contained in the poetic words used in the middle piece to replace those lost in the mists of time. The music by Ockeghem remains, but with its title only, Malheur me bat, which might be described as the French opposite of “opportunity knocks”. It has not been sung in modern times, so the Tallis Scholars, under Peter Phillips, commissioned a modern French poet to pen something new. And here is a translation of that chanson for three voices (to be found 49 minutes in):-

Misfortune has struck me/battered me,

My heart is sad.

Joy has moved away,

My birds have all taken flight.

Sorrow lays me low.

I am the tree in the night that will not see the morning light;

That will not see the morning nor hear them sing in Latin.

Misfortune has battered me,

Sorrow lays me low.

Well, it doesn’t come much more knackered than that. And it was almost 3am by the time I got home. For someone who is making a point at the moment of observing a fairly strict sleep regime, this looks like a category error. But, as Steve McQueen said in The Magnificent Seven, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Listen and I hope you’ll agree that it was.

The Economist this week has two stories back-to-back in its Science and Technology section on cognitive enhancement. Not surprisingly the first one, which is about the widespread use of cognition-enhancing drugs (such as Ritalin and Provigil) to help you pass exams or improve performance, and the expectation of more to come, has been given the greater attention by the wider press. It’s a scare story about competition and cheating and raises the possibility of the need to test students as potential drug cheats. But The Economist takes a controversial tack in its editorial, likening this to “harmless” coffee and arguing it is a good thing.

It falls on deaf ears here because this is a week when I did not drink or eat any coffee, milk, wheat product, potato, rice or any refined carbohydrate excepting that contained in one bar of 85% cocoa chocolate. I drank no alcohol either. I’ve been doing this as a stricter enforcement of a paleo-style diet to help regulate my weight, but above all else to enhance cognition, and for longer-term preventative health. As far as I’m aware, it is working. With one or two qualifications. Those qualifications being a coincident virus that caused a migraine which lasted longer than I’d normally expect, prompting a little hypochondria and Googling for ideas about nutritional deficiency — to no avail.

The paleo-style diet (or lifestyle) is hard to sustain and I can tell you that it has been a lot harder in the short run than popping a few pills. But my argument with The Economist‘s view is that the brain is a complex system: don’t mess with it if you don’t need to. My own experience seems to suggest that I’m a little insulin-resistant, with diabetes in the family, so a lower-carb diet is likely to be beneficial.

But the second story in The Economist pairing owes more to my approach than the pill-popping. This other story describing research that social position can be detrimental to cognition has received no mainstream attention elsewhere, as far as Google can tell us. It has been, thus far, editorially cold-shouldered, and subordinated, and yet by far and away it is the more interesting story for self-experimenters, self-improvers, collaborationists, diversity specialists, managers, teachers, coaches and parents.

Pamela Smith and colleagues from Radboud University Nijmegen suspected that a lack of social power might reduce someone’s ability to keep track of information and make plans to achieve goals in difficult and distracting circumstances. This seems like common sense, not least because I’ve seen a number of situations, for example, where even senior executives have lost confidence and status and then suffered a quite immediate impairment. I’ve even experienced it myself at significant moments. I once had to pitch for $30 million for a management buy-out having been booked into a shoddy lower-Manhattan hotel where the breakfast was served on paper plates. Not a good start to the day. The next day, for the next pitch, I moved to a different hotel and a waterside suite — ironically for much the same price.

The Economist says:-

To explore this theory, she (Dr Smith) carried out three tests. In the first, participants were divided at random into groups of superiors and subordinates. They were told that the superiors would direct and evaluate the subordinates and that this evaluation would determine the subordinates’ payment for the experiment. Superiors were paid a fixed amount. The subordinates were then divided into two further groups: powerless and empowered. A sense of powerlessness was instilled, the researchers hoped, by having participants write for several minutes about a time when they were powerless or by asking them to unscramble sets of words including “obey”, “subordinate” and so on to form sentences. The empowered, by contrast, were asked to write about when they had been on top, or to form sentences including “authority”, “dominate” and similar words.

Not much, you might say, to induce a sense of inferiority or superiority when compared with the real-life stress of a domineering boss or other confidence-draining circumstance, but nevertheless enough to make an impact on several cognitive tasks:-

In all three tests Dr Smith found that low-power participants made 2-5% more errors than their high-power counterparts. She argues that these results were not caused by the low-power volunteers being less motivated, as they had the same financial incentive as the high-power volunteers to do well. Instead, she suspects that those lacking in power suffered adverse cognitive effects from that very lack, and thus had difficulty maintaining their focus on the tasks.

A common problem in evaluating how well someone is doing relative to their ability is the often-mentioned fundamental attribution error: a pretty universal cognitive bias where we will tend to ascribe another‘s failure in a task to their personality rather than their circumstances — largely because we will probably have more data about their personality than the circumstances. Conversely, we judge our own failures more kindly because we know what extenuates them.

What Pamela Smith’s findings suggest is that when we are judging an individual for promotion, for example, it is quite possible that their performance will be transformed once they emerge from a subordinate position, and even more so if we have failed to motivate them properly. They may have been swimming hard against a tidal flow that we cannot see.

Of course, this applies from hiring manager to teacher, coach, and parent, and should require CEOs and other leaders to show a little more humility given the cognitive momentum their high status affords them.

While I love what the cognitive sciences are doing these days, I can’t help but be reminded of the existing literature on these matters. This one evokes the first record I ever owned: Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of The Ugly Duckling. And this YouTube rendering is not so different from the way I used to enjoy it nearly 40 years ago.

Take a look. And believe that you are a swan.

I’ve been interested in the concept of athletic injury — why it happens and how to avoid it — since my early attempts at distance running went wrong. My failure to properly manage the progression from half- to full-marathon training scuppered my enjoyment at the full distance and cost me no small amount of time, money and pain at the physio clinic.

Last year I asked the London Marathon folks how many places they allocate each year, and how many drop out before the day, but answer came there none. Many runners, I’m sure, tough it out on inadequate training and recovery, just as I did in 2005, with a virus or other illness that seems marginal in the context of the joy of getting a place in this massive mobile folk festival, or the sense of obligation to one’s sponsors. The latter, of course, is very powerful.

But during all my middle-aged attempts at higher fitness, I think the most interesting concept I’ve come across appeared just the other day in the sports science newsletter Peak Performance:-

There is a price to be paid for developing specific robustness, and it goes some way to explaining how highly trained athletes can still be susceptible to injury. As training and strength progress we become increasingly adapted to the stimulus our body expects. However, high levels of adaptation to a familiar stress may conversely leave you potentially fragile to an unexpected stress. And as the highly adaptable and complex being that you are, it is often tiny unexpected stresses that may prove catastrophic. This is referred to as the robustness-fragility trade-off.

The concept is new to me, but presumably it will not be to those familiar with complex systems, be they biological or technological. I’m guessing here that it should also resonate in the workplace, school, the home and even the family. The more we become good at the specific skill, task, business or market orientation, the more vulnerable perhaps we are to some not entirely distant butterfly-wing flap – the tooth that cracks while biting on nothing more than a lettuce leaf.

Well, I’ve heard in business the suggestion that the big non-linearities are kind of unavoidable, and that their impact will be evenly distributed, so there is not much competitive advantage in laying down tools and tinkering in some other less defined direction, which is what the Peak Performance article advocates for physiological purposes.

I think they are telling us to do a bit more than just cross-training, the benefits of which are well-documented, but try and incorporate a range of movements into your life and workouts. For example, the article recommends introducing a “bandwidth of variability” in the way we run or exercise, and do things that challenge our coordination.

For runners (which is mostly where my interests lie) exercises like skipping and even hopscotch are recommended. It seems a far cry from what we conceive of as the serious business of piling on the miles.

Perhaps a bit more corporate hopscotch, and some of our currently endangered institutions might now be looking a little less vulnerable? But I doubt the stock analysts would be able to reduce it to a metric for discussion, so it is only through the wisdom of failure that most managers are likely to allocate any time or resources to such a pursuit.

The difficulty is that we prefer to focus on the task in hand and see ourselves progress directly at the sport or discipline in which we will be measured. The greater discipline required to step back and spend a little bit of time filling in the gaps seems to come at the cost of specific progress on that road to greater robustness in our chosen sport or business endeavour. That less-travelled training road is also likely to leave us feeling that we are falling behind our colleagues or competitors.

For example, if the choice exists between dropping some miles on the training path and some core stability training, the closer to an event the more likely that non sport-specific activity is going to be foregone if there is some other pressing work or family responsibility.

Very early readers of the Knackered Hack will recall my focus on rugby player Jonny Wilkinson‘s return to competitive sport, and his own comments on the mismanagement of his early training regime.

Up to now I have perhaps not had the strength to make these tough decisions because I always believed the toughest decision was to stay on the field and “tough it out” for an extra hour or so. The tough decisions for me now are about getting the most out of my training while still being able to rest and recuperate for the weekend’s game. I still train numerous times every day but I try now to train better and smarter, which does not necessarily always mean longer.

It is for this reason that, rather than focus on a specific event goal like the marathon, my training approach is now holistic, trying to put together some of the things I’ve learned over the past several years. This may mean a slower, more varied route to robustness. All that said, my opinion of my current regime is that it is still too monotonous. So, inspired by Peak Performance, I will be ringing the changes in the coming weeks with weights, tennis, badminton, skipping, basketball, and maybe even some hopscotch (corporate and otherwise).